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Opinion: Editorials

From the Editorial Advisory Board: Las Vegas

Posted:
10/06/2017 08:15:15 PM MDT

Veronica Hartfield, left, widow of slain Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Officer Charleston Hartfield, and their son Ayzayah Hartfield, 15, attend a vigil for Charleston Hartfield at Police Memorial Park on Thursday in Las Vegas. Charleston Hartfield, who was off duty at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival last Sunday, was killed when Stephen Paddock opened fire on the crowd killing at least 58 people and injuring more than 450. The massacre is one of the deadliest mass shooting events in U.S. history. (Ethan Miller / Getty Images North America)

This week's topic: Another mass shooting, more thoughts and prayers for the victims. Is that the best we can do?

Are we nuts?

Through indifference and ignorance we have let the gun lobby buy our legislators. Yes, it's a fact that they lobby for hunters, but mostly they lobby for the unrestricted manufacture, purchase, and use of guns solely designed for the purpose of killing people.

This is an extreme example but the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) said that throughout his political career, Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner has received $3,879,064 from the National Rifle Association through donations or spending for his benefit. The CRP is a nonprofit, non-partisan research group that tracks the effects of money and lobbying.

Sen. Gardner's campaign committee has raised a total of $17,792,997 since 2009. How can Sen. Gardner possibly vote against the NRA when almost 21 percent of his campaign funding comes from the NRA?

But the gun lobby isn't the only problem. Political action committees that can spend whatever they want to push their agenda are another problem.

The CRP said the NRA "opened its coffers to make $54.3 million in outside expenditures," for the 2016 election cycle. A good guess is that most of this money was given to the NRA by gun manufacturers.

Here is what we can do to stay sane: work for and fund political candidates who will vote for campaign finance reform that limits the amount of money politicians can receive from any one entity, including a lobby or corporation. This might give us a shot at taking back our country from the gun lobby.

Several years ago my sister and I each attended two different funerals on the same day in Boulder. Both services were for a 20-something-year-old man. Both of these young men took their own lives with a gun. The services were filled with brokenhearted family and friends.

According to the Colorado Health Institute, in 2015 almost 50 percent of Colorado's 1,093 suicides were carried out with guns. Suicide attempts with firearms are almost always successful. That is not the case with pills, or even hanging.

What can be done to limit suicides with firearms? We could expand the list of circumstances that prohibit someone from purchasing a gun to include those who pose a danger to themselves. Currently, if you have a felony conviction, a domestic violence restraining order or an involuntary commitment to a mental health hospital, you are on the list. That's it. A family member who knows you are suicidal can't put your name on the list. Your psychiatrist can't even get you on the list if they know you are suicidal. Not even temporarily. That's crazy.

How about a five-day waiting period to buy a gun? Currently, anyone 21 years old or older can walk into a gun store and within an hour walk out with a gun and ammunition. No training required. No questions asked. Bang, they're dead.

Yes, contrary to what many people believe, thoughts and prayers are the best things that we can do after a tragedy like Las Vegas occurs. But we can do a whole lot better before these things happen.

First, when you have someone as incompetent as John R. Spencer you should fire him and correct his mistakes. In 2010, Mr. Spencer, in his role as chief of the ATF's Firearms Technology Branch, approved the manufacture and sale of bump stocks. It is truly amazing that he bought the argument that these devices were "intended to assist persons whose hands have limited mobility to 'bump fire' an AR-15 type rifle." Not only was Mr. Spencer's ruling contrary to the plain language of the National Firearms Act, he went against ATF precedent. His predecessor, aware of the dangers of automatic weapons, even deemed illegal a 14-inch long shoestring designed to rapidly fire a semiautomatic weapon.

Congress had the next opportunity to correct Mr. Spencer's mistake. Unfortunately, instead of a simple bill to do so, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California overreached after Sandy Hook with a gun control bill so broad that even fellow Democratic senators opposed it. Seems she got it right this week by introducing a new bill that even the NRA supports.

Finally, there is really no need to wait for Congress to act. President Trump should direct the ATF to rescind Mr. Spencer's 2010 approval today. Imagine that. An effective "common sense" response that nearly everyone agrees with.

Thoughts and prayers? If offering those to victims isn't our natural and genuine instinct as a country or human population in the face of a tragedy, we have much more fundamental challenges than gun control. Regardless, despite any amount of energetic support flowing to those who are suffering loss from events already occurred, if thoughts and prayers are the sole defense we can muster to stave off attacks of the future our prognosis is grim, and our inaction is a disservice to those with hearts — or bodies — already broken by violence.

In 2013, Mother Jones plotted a trend line based on CDC data showing a direct correlation between states with higher gun ownership and their respective rates of gun death. A 1996 gun buy-back program in Australia was followed by a 50 percent drop in suicides over the next decade. The Harvard Injury Control Center found that community by community, more guns are matched by more homicides.

Gun statistics are only a part of the story. Perpetrators of mass shootings are generally analyzed as feeling wronged by traditional society. The shock so many of us felt at the election of outsider Donald Trump shows that there are many more people who feel disenfranchised and powerless in this country than we let ourselves realize. Most won't act out in violence, but that doesn't mean that cultural stratification and iniquities can be ignored. Removing weapons is important, but suturing wounds is our deeper challenge.

Much attention rightly focuses on the madness of Paddock's means. Let's talk about the madness of his impulse.

With each mass shooting, we frantically try to classify the killer within an expanding taxonomy of hatred: Islamic terrorist, anti-abortion warrior, white supremacist, psychopathic homophobe. Yet we ignore the genus common to them all: silent, secretive, resentful men, plotting some twisted revenge.

We ignore it because male revenge is normative in America. Liberals decry the fact that we are a gun culture, but we barely notice that we are a revenge culture. In fact, "Don't get mad, get even," is approved advice across all sectors of society. Retribution sagas saturate our media, and avengers are our heroes.

But revenge is not justice. The originating perpetrators are usually long gone. So "vengeance" is wrought on a new cycle of victims, each to cope with their own traumas, and sometimes, new fantasies of reprisal.

With Paddock, we've reached the quintessence of this type. He apparently had no agenda at all, other than some secret instructions dictated by the rage entombed within his passive exterior by a bank-robbing father, who was himself a violent master of disguise. His atrocity unleashed a cluster-bomb of trauma through hundreds of families, the effects of which will be felt for generations.

We need new narratives for this. We need to celebrate the courage it takes a man to heal instead of brood — to stand up and say: "Whatever bloodstained trail of trauma led to me, ends with me."

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